The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)

Occasional reprieve happened only when Eera was nearby or when I was slaving at a construction site, or worked at the translation of another story. But even then, the crushing anxiety did not disappear entirely, but only receded into the background. Physical pain is more merciful – the part of the brain receiving the pain signals gets inured and eventually turned off, so the pain no longer reaches you.

I did not attempt to alleviate my situation. Firstly, because I never learned to analyze and make up plans for actions, I just lived on, silent about where it pains, enduring the unbearable. Secondly, the alternative to that agony was no less horrible than the torture itself…

Our team was sent to the local train stop "Priseimovye" by the bridge over the river of Seim to build a 2-apartment cottage for the track-men and their families. We worked there about a fortnight.

At one of the midday breaks, I spread my spetzovka on the grass and lay down next to the sun-scorched footpath with the traffic lines of ants bustling over the cracks in the ground. To pass the time at one-hour midday breaks, I had Vsesvit, a thick monthly received on subscription, where they printed Ukrainian translations from the world literature of all times and peoples. Soon, I got tired of reading and put my head on a page in the open magazine.

It was a sunny day around, filled to the brim with the busy summertime life. The ants were dragging their flotsam and jetsam along the cracked footpath, the tall grass, swaying under the rare gusts of breeze, carried the shaky shadows of leaves in the foliage of trees and bushes above it. The unending buzz of horseflies, bees, wasps, and common flies filled the sultry air.

From time to time, the breeze idly picked up the page next to the one under my head, and then everything around got screened off with whiteness and blurry spots of letters brought overmuch close to the pupil. The standing page effaced the piers of the bridge across the river, and the long spit of a narrow sand island washed up by the unruly current, as well as the fisherman standing on that island with his long fishing rod, everything got lost behind the whitish blurriness.

Then the page would fall back to disclose that same fisherman, yet standing in the current already up to the ankles of his high rubber boots. The fishing rod got bent by the taut line, he whipped it up snatching from the restless stream the flicking splendor of a catch. The geezer took it off the hook and threw behind his back onto the spit, where the fish went on pulsating in the sand. He threw the freshly baited hook back into the river and, watching the float, did not notice the river gull that crabbed up along the sand to the beating of the fish. Grabbing its prey, the bird flew off.

The fisherman did not see that, neither how another river gull dived from above the bridge, attacking the first one. They collided in the air fight, and the fish fell from a five-meter height back into the river. The geezer did not see anything of that, he stubbornly followed the float.

It was only I, who saw the whole episode, but nothing of it touched me. I did not even hold the page so as to watch uninterruptedly. The river and the white blur took turns before my eyes, and I saw that all of that was Nothing. All that life full of events and struggles and changes was just a series of pictures on top of Nothing. I watched, and I could also not watch and nothing would change anything. Everything was drowned in absolute Nothing. Even the constantly present pain receded getting flooded with Nothing, from which I did not need anything.

I lay stretched out like that long spit of sand around which the stream of life hasted on, gurgling and splashing, but both of us knew that all that was just one and the same, bleak, void, Nothing. That was some terrifying knowledge. How could you live with it? How to live on without wanting anything and rid of waiting for something? So, the choice I had was not overly extensive: either Eera and the hang-fire agony, or Nothing…

Eera was visiting Konotop without you as well. So was it for the occasion of Vladya's wedding, when the winter was setting in.

He married Alla, who already had a child and worked at a large canteen. The wedding party was held at that very canteen on the outskirts of the city, nearby the stop of the diesel train to Dubovyazovka. The "live music" included already heavily bald Skully and still curly-haired Chuba. At times, at the guests' warm requests, the groom also approached the mike to sing along with the ex-Orpheuses. Everything was delicious, loud, and fun.

But all that was on the second day of Eera's stay, and in the late evening of the first day, I made two discoveries. The first was about the hidden resources in the human body…

At the starting night, Eera and I passed thru the veranda to the attached room. In winter it was not heated and turned into a sort of storeroom for odd household things. That’s why when leaving the kitchen, Eera threw over her shoulders some of the jackets from the hooks by the door; she always liked to try things on. In the room among the other things, there stood a pair of old armchairs, the relics from the Object times, whose wooden armrests still retained their yellow varnish and enough of stability to let us have deeply satisfying sex among other stored items. At such moments I did not think of any agonies…

We seemed to cum together but Eera, with her eyes half-closed, started to moan "More! More!." Until that moment, I knew it for dead sure that after orgasm you needed to catch a breath for at least half an hour.

"Mo-ore!."

And up I got to penetrate and go on above the glitter of the freshly spilled trickle that aspersed the floorboards a minute ago. However impossible, at times it, nonetheless, can happen…

The second discovery, concerning the white spots in the human's conscience, occurred when Eera and I returned to the living-room.

My father had already gone to the bedroom, and my mother, who felt completely out of sorts on that evening, sat on the folding coach-bed with her hands dropped widely off onto the seat, she was looking in front of her and not at the TV on its stand between the two windows. Only Lenochka was watching it from her, not yet slid-out, chair-bed. The subdued murmur of the TV merged with the feeble light from a couple of bulbs in the luster.

After groaning for a while, my mother asked me and Eera to help her to the bedroom because she had no strength in her at all. We took her by the arms from both sides and helped to get up. Giving out weak grunts and shuffling her slippers over the floor, she moved, with our support, towards the curtains in the doorway to the dark kitchen.

In that manner, the 3 of us reached the middle of the room beneath the chandelier of 5 white shades only 2 of which painted the circles of yellowish electric light in the whitewashed ceiling. When there remained a final couple of meters to the doorway, the light around me suddenly dimmed going away and I found myself confined in the darkness, not complete though because I could discern that I was having a sex with my mother from behind. Wild horror lashed me, kinda electric shock, and threw back into the lighted living-room. To the kitchen doorway, there still remained a distance of about a meter.

In fright, I gave Eera a sidelong glance over the white kerchief swaddling my mother's head. Eera, with her eyebrows knit together, took care to keep her eyes on the lowered profile of my mother as if she had not noticed anything. So, that was just a vision, yet more prolonged than that second of running thru the Greek night…

Asking Eera to hold alone for a sec, I hurried into the kitchen to turn the light on there. We took my mother to the bedroom and helped her to sink onto the bed, where my father muttered something in his sleep. Then we returned to the living-room.

Befuddled and kinda reeled, I slid the folding bed-armchair for Lenochka and slid out the folding coach-bed for us. Soon all of the khutta turned into a mutual sleeping kingdom. Only the clock on the wall above the TV was ticking from its plastic box against my temples. It also had no answer to what all that was at all and why that all had to be happening to me…

~ ~ ~

As always before, accepting the notebooks with my translations, Zhomnir jerked his bushy eyebrow up and started to read, inserting his pencil marks in between the widely spaced lines, though he agreed that his options were also not ideal.

"Your trouble, Sehrguey, is that Ukrainian is not your native tongue, you hadn't absorbed it with your mother's milk."

I refrained from stating that the first months in my life I was nourished with the milk of Carpathian cows.

He went over to his archival chamber and returned with a thin book in his hands. "These are Gutsalo's stories. That's how one should write!"

And Zhomnir began to read out excerpt lines from the book, clicking his tongue at the end of especially cool ones, then he handed the book to me for mastering the craft.

(…I had read that collection as well as any other works by E. Gutsalo ever coming my way. What am I to do if singing praises of devotion to the morning dew on cucumber seedlings do not turn me up? (For that same reason, by the way, I do not like Yesyenin even though he's from Ryazan region.) Besides, after The Enchanted Desna by Dovzhenko, who had so beautifully exhausted the theme, attempts at picking it up anew are doomed to miserable copying of the flavors and mood.

And when Gutsalo tried his hand at writing on city life, he dropped off to the level of cartoons in the satirical magazine Perets. I am ready to agree that in one of his stories of that period, he managed to mention the reddish brick dust on the black padded jackets of bricklayers, but the detail had nothing to do with the plot nor with the characters in the story. The good but odd detail just stayed dangling about, a kinda limp cock in an immense vagina…

The constituent parts of a work should add, converge, and develop the whole structure, the way it’s done by pulling the constellation of the Southern Cross and the shimmer of lamplight in the red hair of the doctor on the empty ship deck in the lines opening The Rain by Somerset Maugham, to suggestively send the reader’s train of thoughts down the road towards the clash of priesthood and prostitution…)

Yet Zhomnir should know better and, so as to compensate for the faulty nurture in my early days and mitigate the backwash of skipping the Ukrainian literature lessons at School 13, I took a thin copybook, titled it "Ukr. Lit." and then read all of the books in Ukrainian from the 2 long shelves in the Plant Club library.

There were both Lesya Ukrainka and her mother Olena Bdgilka, and Panas Myrny with his oxen, and the splendidly great Kobzar, and Marko Vovchok, and Ivan Franko, and Jankowski (idolized by Zhomnir) and many others in alphabetical order. About some of them, even Zhomnir knew only from the skimpy notes taken at the overview lectures attended by him in his student years.

(…after sifting all of that thru the sieve of careful reading, I can safely state that in the terms of artistic value most of the authorised authors failed at creating anything above the level of petty amateurs. Quoting a Ukrainian proverb, "Where there is no nightingale, you’ll get nothing but sparrow chirrup."

The sparrow-squealers just kept retelling the latest European fashion in the contemporary belles-lettres. That's great! Glory be to them! The Ukrainian language began to be seen thru the press. However, that's politics and I am talking about the literature.

As of yet, only three authors in the Ukrainian literature would pass with their colors flying in front of the world literary standards:

1. poet Kandyba, aka Olyes, who had for years been wallowing knee-deep in blood at the Kiev slaughterhouse, writing the tenderest poems imaginable;

2. writer Vasil Stephanic;

3. writer Les Martovic.

Real master knows what he wants to say, because he has what to say, and he also knows how to say it even without much of learning, just as humans find out the way of natural breathing. The rest of the literature aficionados are left with jingling their cowbells in an attempt to portray the newest of the fashionable waltzes by Herr Strauss, which he creates to the delight and admiration of the decent European public.

Still and regardless! We will catch up, and overtake his orchestra because we've got our inimitable balalaikas!.)

So, after work, I had what to busy myself with. And even a local train could be easily turned into a passable study. That's why on Fridays, I came to At-Seven-Winds with the briefcase and, after work, in the train car, I took out of it a thin copybook, a pen, and a volume of stories by Maugham, in English.

Stooping over the compact print in a book page, I plunged into the tender humid night of the exotic southern seas, where the fragrance of the jungle in bloom spreads for miles beyond the islands.

Emerging back from there with a pair of rough lines for the copybook, I stacked the pinch into the ruled-paper cells, and dived away to roam forth along the sandy beach by the water's edge with white-crested, even in the dark, waves of the rolling surf, and, with a start, looked thru the pane in the car window… Pryosterny?.

Delicious rides they were…

Writing into a copybook placed atop of the briefcase was not comfortable, yet the desk problem found its elegant solution. On Fridays after work, I extracted from my locker the plywood piece intended for the shelf to keep a headgear because if you're holding a piece of plywood 50cm ? 60cm pressed in your armpit, it doesn't look too outrageous and, actually, it is not in the way when boarding a bus or a train car.

Upon arrival in Nezhyn, the desk of plywood perfectly fitted into an automatic storage cell, while the briefcase traveled to Red Partisans and there under the table covered with the tulle tablecloth, on which the old pier mirror stood leaning against the wall. The expenses for storage of that single item in a cell amounted to reasonable 30 kopecks: 15 kopecks to set the code inside the door and slam it, 15 kopecks more to open it, after collecting the code from outside.

Once, on the way back to Konotop, the cell door jammed. In such cases, it's opened by an on-duty station attendant with a special key, and in the presence of a militiaman. Before opening the frivolous cell, the militiaman asked me about the things put inside.